Enhancing your security posture

If you carefully read this entire chapter, it should be very clear that you can't use the old approach to security facing today's challenges and threats. For this reason, it is important to ensure that your security posture is prepared to deal with these challenges. To accomplish this, you must solidify your current protection system across different devices regardless of the form factor.

It is also important to enable IT and security operations to quickly identify an attack, by enhancing the detection system. Last but certainly not least, it is necessary to reduce the time between infection and containment by rapidly responding to an attack by enhancing the effectiveness of the response process.

Based on this, we can safely say that the security posture is composed of three foundational pillars as shown in the following diagram:

These pillars must be solidified and if in the past, the majority of the budget was put into protection, now it's even more imperative to spread that investment and level of effort across the other pillars. These investments are not exclusively in technical security controls, they must also be done in the other spheres of the business, which includes administrative controls.

It is recommended to perform a self-assessment to identify the gaps within each pillar from the tool perspective. Many companies evolved over time and never really updated their security tools to accommodate the new threat landscape and how attackers are exploiting vulnerabilities.

A company with an enhanced security posture shouldn't be part of the statistics that were previously mentioned (229 days between the infiltration and detection). This gap should be drastically reduced and the response should be immediate. To accomplish this, a better incident response process must be in place, with modern tools that can help security engineers to investigate security-related issues. Chapter 2, Incident Response Process will cover incident response in more detail and Chapter 13, Investigating an Incident, will cover some case studies related to actual security investigations.